Cibola Burn

He held out his hand terminal, and Elvi took it. She tried to look serious, not to seem impressed. She was a scientist, for God’s sake, facing a serious question, not a girl who’d get on her family’s shared feed and burble about how James Holden had been in her hut. She flipped the images back and forth. Human brains were wired to see movement, and so the shifting shadows were easy to spot when she went quickly.

“Something’s moving,” she agreed. “Can we see what it is?”

“Not a lot of imaging satellites up there yet,” Holden said. “The Roci’s built for ship-to-ship combat more than ground visualization.”

Anywhere in the solar system, it wouldn’t have been like this. There were so many cameras of such exquisite sensitivity, almost nothing could happen in the vast emptiness inside the orbit of Neptune that couldn’t be seen if someone wanted to look for it. It was another reminder of how far from home they were, and how many axioms of daily life didn’t apply here.

“What does the Israel see?” she asked.

“Nothing that’s a lot better,” Holden said. “That’s why we’re going out. It’s right at the range of the vehicles. It’s going to take the better part of the day to get out there.”

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, I see it’s decently large, but there are likely to be any number of large organisms in the ocean and colder environments.”

“Organisms don’t make power spikes,” Holden said. “All sorts of things are moving on this planet. All the time. This just started.”

Elvi touched the image, expanding it until the shadows blurred.

“You’re right. We should check it out,” she said. “Let me get my instruments.”

An hour later, she was in the back of an open loader, Fayez at her side. Holden sat in front of them, in the passenger’s seat, while Chandra Wei drove. A vicious-looking rifle jounced at Wei’s side, in easy reach if violence came on them unexpectedly. The loader’s engines whined, and the wheels ground against the stones of the wind-paved desert.

“Why didn’t Sudyam come?” Elvi asked, shouting to be heard over the loader and the wind.

Fayez leaned close to her shoulder. “Wei thought it would be good to have someone on the exobio workgroup still alive if this went poorly.”

Elvi’s felt her eyes go wide, and she glanced at the woman in the driver’s seat. “Really?”

“She phrased it more gently,” Fayez said.

There was no demarcation of the border, no fence or road to show that they had left First Landing. The stone-and-dirt hills rose and fell, organisms like grass or fungus clinging to the land and being crushed under the loader’s wheels. Slowly, the ruins that had become Elvi’s landmark on New Terra thinned and shrank and fell out of view. She leaned her head against the loader’s roll bar, letting the vibrations of the land translate themselves through her skull. Wei looked over her shoulder, and Elvi smiled at her. The memories of a hundred field excursions in graduate school left her body expecting beer and marijuana, and the anxiety of the actual errand tugged at her. Every day for weeks, she had found some new organism or fact that humanity had never seen before, and now she was going to something possibly even more alien. No one had said the word protomolecule, but the implication was thick as cement. Animals didn’t make a power surge. The aliens did.

In the wide, bright sky above them, high-altitude winds pulled a huge green-and-pink cloud into thin streamers. The speculation on Luna was that the strange cloud coloration meant an organism was present in them, something that packed its own minerals up into the sky and used the vapor the way salmon used spawning pools. It was only a hypothesis. The truth could be a thousand times stranger. Or it could be utterly mundane. Elvi watched the bright fleece of cloud stretch, and the sun track a little too slowly past it. Fayez was typing furiously on his hand terminal. Wei drove with a focus and intensity that seemed to be her signature ever since she’d come to the surface. Which meant ever since Reeve and the others had gone missing.

Elvi wondered what it meant that she could go out into the absolute unknown, tracking across a planet with no idea what the local dangers might be, and it was thoughts of the people back in First Landing that frightened her. New Terra was supposed to be dangerous and wild and unknown. It was only living up to expectations. The dangers that the people posed were worse because she hadn’t seen it coming. And so she was afraid she wouldn’t next time either.

She wasn’t aware of drifting into a doze until Fayez put his hand on her shoulder and shook her gently back to herself. He pointed up. A bright spot lit the blue of the sky like Venus seen from Earth. It grew slowly brighter as it tracked west. A thin white contrail formed behind it, the only perfectly straight line in the organically twisting sky. A shuttle. Elvi frowned.

“Were we expecting the shuttle?” she asked.